Entry posted by Troacctid
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Blood Runs Deep: A Dagannoth Christmas
Rally the troops, fulfill a prophecy and prepare to defend your loved ones as the Fremennik go to war! Can you lead a ferocious assault on Waterbirth Island in our latest quest?
It's that time of the year again. The time when we set aside our differences to celebrate peace and love, feel the spirit of giving, and of course, violently cleave some dagannoth skulls with a large axe!
"Guthix bless us, every--*thwunk* Aargh my arm! What are you doing?! Gaah, no, not the spine, not the--*crunch* Oh Jesus, the pain!"
From Jagex's Twitter hint, I totally thought this week was going to be the Christmas Wintumber event. Turns out we got something a little more exciting and a lot more violent: the follow-up to Glorious Memories, in which, well, let me go over the plot for you.
[hide=Synopsis]So you start the quest with Baba Yaga on Lunar Isle. Apparently, she wants to go inside a random stranger's dreams. Setting aside the creepy implications of such a venture, we go into a dream sequence in which we learn that the unconscious stranger is an obscure character mentioned in the dialogue of the Lighthouse quest. Apparently this dude went loopy and was helping the Dagannoth Mother raise a Dagannoth Army to take over the Fremennik Province. And apparently the dagannoths are ready to invade RIGHT NOW. Oh [cabbage].
In fact, it seems he's so kooky that the dagannoths in his dream start piling you, and you have to kill a whole bunch of them to "hold them off" or something while Baba Yaga casts some absurdly long spell to leave the dream. Lovely. You then spend several minutes killing dagannoths with no real indication of when exactly the spell will be ready, which is a little annoying. Then you leave the dream and find out that the dagannoths are attacking Rellekka RIGHT NOW. Oh [cabbage]! So you have to go back to Rellekka and do the exact same thing as before, smacking around some interminable number of semiaquatic monsters, again without any indication of your progress. Great. Although to be fair, the music in this section ("Jaws of the Dagannoth") was admittedly pretty sweet.
So you beat back the initial assault and it's time to bring the fight back to the enemy. Ex-yeti King Vargas is way ahead of you on this front and has already...well, been captured. You need to rescue the poor guy. And so, after Queen Sigrid gives us a big axe, we commence an escort mission. Does anybody really like escort missions? You walk very slowly through the cave so that the poor, limping Vargas can keep up. Meanwhile, dagannoths, rock lobsters, and magic walruses come at you from all sides to kill you in various nasty ways. Joy. At the end of that ordeal, you finally escape, and let King Vargas up the ladder first. Naturally, he collapses the cave behind him by accident, burying you in a pile of boulders. You wake up in the afterlife. Come on man, what the [cabbage], Vargas?
So the afterlife dudes pull the old "WTF are you doing here you're not supposed to be dead" line on you and send you back. Then you have a wedding on a boat and you go to kill some more dagannoths. You have a fight with some sentinels that heal each other, then you go kill the Dagannoth Mother in a big boss fight. Afterwards, you collapse the cave to trap her inside, and accidentally get boulder'd again. [cabbage].
Afterlife dude lets you go AGAIN, saying "Geez n00b, I thought I told you it wasn't your time. GTFO from my Valhalla." Then you go back to salute your fallen allies (Prince Brand and Princess Astrid die...so much for your marriage) and the quest is over.[/hide]
I have a few bones to pick with this quest. Let's go through them.
- Escort mission. Everyone hates escort missions. The fact that you have an escort mission in the first place is a strike against you already. But the facepalming was compounded further by making the NPC limp slower than walking speed. That means we had to actually stop or backtrack to let Vargas catch up even if we weren't running. Lame.
- Battles of indeterminate length. Don't get me wrong, it was pretty cool fighting dagannoths as they attacked Rellekka. The setting gave it a real "I am defending my homeland!" atmosphere, and I liked the "THIS. IS. RELLEKKA!" bit. But randomly killing dagannoths without an obvious objective was annoying. I'd have preferred to have some indication of how many you still need to take down. With them just respawning after you kill them, it doesn't really feel like you're turning the tide in a war where you're hopelessly outnumbered, which is how it's supposed to feel. It ends up seeming aimless and arbitrary. Same kind of problem in the dream sequence.
- The final boss. The new magic interface is just not responsive enough to handle the Dagannoth Mother's rapid color-changing well, making for a frustrating battle.
- The Waterbirth shortcut. Why would you make such a useful shortcut available during the quest but not let us use it again afterwards? I thought you might have learned from player feedback for Within the Light. It's stupid because it gives an unfair advantage to people who leave the quest unfinished. I want to use the shortcut to get to rock lobsters and Dagannoth Kings more easily too, but why should I have to give up my quest cape and 450k experience to do so? Hopefully this will be patched quickly.
That said, it wasn't all bad. There were epic moments. It was a pretty challenging quest. It tied up some loose ends in the storyline. All good things. And the reward is perfect--combat experience and a new, specialized weapon. Both fitting rewards for an advanced quests.
Bottom line
A mixed bag: awesome rewards and awesome story, but some frustrating gameplay elements.
Additional note
Should I have the widget boxes on the left, on the right, or split between both sides? I can't decide which looks best.
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